Regional Pay

Shabana Mahmood Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Alison Seabeck]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. She is not going to have an opportunity to make a speech, owing to time constraints, but I am sure that the Scottish people will have heard her comment.

Median pay in the south-west is already £14 a week less than the national average. Many of the public sector workers there have also been the subject of pay freezes, pay caps or pension contribution increases, all of which have reduced their spending power. Plymouth is a city that is heavily dependent on the public sector; the hospital is the largest employer. There is real concern there about the damage that a decision to reduce wage levels in the region, or locally, could have on an economy that is just about keeping its head above water.

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

We have heard a lot about the private sector from Government Members, but does my hon. Friend believe that it would be instructive to note that many large national private sector employers have pay bargaining practices that are not dissimilar to those of the public sector?

[Alison Seabeck]

Indeed; I shall touch on that point briefly later.

More than 18,000 people in Plymouth work in the public sector. In my constituency, a massive 25% of the working population do so—one in four people—and to dampen pay rates could be devastating. The Government’s suggestion that it is easy to compare private sector and public sector jobs is absolute nonsense. In the south-west, large swathes of people work in the hospitality and agriculture sectors, earning very low wages. There is no simple read-across, and I would ask the Government to consider that fact carefully.